Rhymesayers At 20: An Oral History

The Minneapolis-based hip-hop label Rhymesayers Entertainment has spent the past two decades releasing some of the best and most important underground rap of the era. It was formed in 1995 out of the ashes of the Headshots crew, a collective of some of the Twin Cities’ hottest underground talent. Producer Anthony (Ant) Davis, rappers Musab “Sab the Artist” Sadd and Sean “Slug” Daley, and all-around hustler Brent “Siddiq” Sayers founded a label to release music by themselves and their friends. But twenty years on, they’ve built a legacy that includes Billboard-charting releases; classic records by an incredible variety of acts; a beloved record store; and, most importantly, a city whose whole hip-hop scene was changed in its wake.

Rhymesayers is celebrating their two decades with a giant concert on December 4th at Minneapolis’ Target Center. Almost everyone who has released music on the label is featured, from Daley and Davis’ Atmosphere (the label’s flagship act almost from the beginning) to Brother Ali to Freeway to Soul Position to Prof. If you’re anywhere near the Twin Cities, it’s a show not to be missed. You can find tickets here.

I got on the phone with Daley and Sayers (as well as one or two other players from the early days) to get the inside scoop on how a couple kids from the Midwest turned the underground upside down. Our conversations have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Brent "Siddiq" Sayers. Photo courtesy of Rhymesayers.

Part I: “Trying to find a balance” - The day jobs

Before Rhymesayers began taking off, Sayers and Daley both learned the business on the ground level – by working in a record store. Sayers, after quitting a high-paying data entry job, ended up working at a Best Buy music store. Daley was a clerk at a well-known shop called Electric Fetus.

Brent “Siddiq” Sayers, CEO, Rhymesayers Entertainment: When Best Buy first started here in Minnesota, they had a couple of dedicated music stores. I put in an application, got that job, took literally like a $10 an hour pay cut between jobs, and worked music floor staff. I worked my way up to being the supervisor and the buyer, and got to buy the music specific for that store. It was good experience for later on, unbeknownst to me.

I gained a lot of experience just in the sense of what happens to records once they’re made and put on the shelf. I sat and watched a lot of records collect dust. I learned right away that building a demand is something that’s important. Just the fact that you’ve got a record isn’t going to matter.

Sean "Slug" Daley. Photo courtesy of Rhyemsayers.

Sean “Slug” Daley, rapper (Atmosphere, Felt) and co-founder, Rhymesayers Entertainment: I was selling whatever was hot in the streets that day. The Electric Fetus was the main record store for the Southside [of Minneapolis]. I’ll put it like this – my number one sellers were No Limit tapes. We were selling straight to the cats that were dishing dope. So I put up a wall between my art and what I was doing in retail. When a cat would find out that I rapped, I would tell him, “You could go listen to my shit on the listening machine over there.” He’d come back like, “Yo, I don’t really fuck with your raps, but I like you as a person.”

Working at that store helped me get known. Cats that were coming in to buy rap shit, even if they didn’t fuck with my kind of rap, they all started to recognize who I was, and that I was Sluggo from a group called Atmosphere. There was a face value to it that was priceless.

Sayers: While I was at Best Buy, I had a couple production companies. We were doing illegal warehouse parties where we would rent out a warehouse and have a couple kegs, and do our own security, setup, and DJ. That got to be a pain in the ass because of all the complications, and people coming in and starting drama. We built a lot through it, but it was a constant headache of the looming potential of something bad happening and us being accountable for it. I knew I didn’t want to stay too involved in that, so we eventually went into doing nightclub promotions, and gained a lot of experience in that. All these things have been stepping stones of a learning process of what evolved into Rhymesayers.

Daley: As far as me pushing Rhymesayers music through Electric Fetus, that was also a plus. I’ve got this audience who are right here in the store trying to buy tapes, and I could be like, “You’re buying this Black Star tape? You should check out my man Beyond.” Or, “You’re buying that? You should check out my guys Los Nativos.” I was able to push Rhymesayers music onto people who I thought were already fucking with that box. And in that regard, I would say working at that store mostly was good for promotional purposes, on a local level.

I was able to have a better look at the behind the scenes of labels and distribution, because it had a one-stop that serviced the whole state. So I was able to pay attention to what worked in what markets, in this state at least. And so it did allow me a little look behind the curtain that I’ll be other people who were starting a label in their bedroom didn’t have.

But at the end of the day, I think most people who start record labels, they do have looks behind curtains. They did some time working for Best Buy, or they did some time working for some label in New York. It seems like everyone was an intern somewhere before they got involved. And I guess how that’s I would see the Electric Fetus, was kind of an internship.

Part II: “Seven’s Travels” - Building the company on the road and at home

As Rhymesayers took on more acts and started selling records in Minnesota and beyond, it was time for some next steps. Sayers concentrated on the home front, while Daley hit the road non-stop, inadvertently creating a whole new circuit for the independent rap acts that followed.

Sayers: I really carried the lion’s share of the workload for those first few years. I was doing production when we all hooked up, and Ant was light-years ahead of me. So I was like, “Here’s my gear. You focus on production, and I’ll focus on the business,” because I felt I had a good acumen for that.

One of the things I noticed in other crews was that there didn’t ever seem to be somebody that stepped back away from the shine, stepped back from having to be onstage, and focused on actually moving the pendulum and taking things somewhere. So that’s what I did.

Daley: I was willing to play anywhere, for peanuts. When I first went out there, I was like, “Look, man. Just let me sleep on your couch, and I’ll come play your fucking show.” There was a booking agent named Christian [Bernhardt], who owned an agency out of Oakland called Kork, and he booked mostly rock bands. He’d seen us play, and he was like, “Hey, I want to book you guys.” He was the first dude to see us and want to take that risk with us. He was like, “What do you want to do? I’ve never booked rap.” And we were like, “Dude, just book us in the same places you book your other shit at, and we’ll take care of the rest.”

Christian Bernhardt, founder, Kork Agency: I think it was 2000 or 2001 – I don’t remember exactly. I started working with a small record label called Anticon in Oakland, because my old company was based there. They were part of this underground hip-hop movement. It was either through them, or maybe Def Jux, who I also worked with, that I connected with Atmosphere, We hit it off right away. They didn’t have an agent at the time. I thought that was crazy, because the band already had a really cool following, small but solid. And so we started working together.

Daley: What Christian did was, he booked us with promoters that typically would promote rock bands, and it opened up a lane that hadn’t really been there yet. Prior to that, rap promotions were, you’d come play a show for a dude that loved rap, or a dude that sold drugs and was trying to figure out how to clean his money so he was throwing rap shows, or a rap group who needed to fill the bill so that they could headline it. If you lost money on that show, it might break you, it might make you quit.

When you start working with rock promoters, there’s a different system involved. None of them were fly by night – they were all established. Now, they were booking small venues, but this is what they did and they were there because they loved being rock stars for booking rock shows.Those dudes party! They’re not in bands, but they get treated like they are. So when we got in with that, it opened a lane up for us, and I think for a lot of underground rap, that hadn’t been there before. When other rappers started to see what we were doing, we watched them follow suit.

Bernhardt: I think what they liked about my approach is that I felt that they belonged in clubs. The whole scene came more from the punk rock, independent side of things, so it made sense to me to book them into rock clubs. They were mostly concerned that I would be using promoters that they befriended with over the years, and I was open to that idea.

Daley: We went indie with everything. We used the indie booking agent, we used the indie publicists. I’m not going to say we learned it from rock, because I wasn’t fully aware of what rock was doing. I can see it perfect right now in hindsight. But at the time, I was basing decisions off of what my gut said.

Part III: “God bless the Fifth Element” - Building a home

In 1999, Rhymesayers opened up a record store, Fifth Element, in Minneapolis. The shop was a place to sell the label’s albums to their hometown fans, of course. But it also quickly turned into a hub for the city’s hip-hop scene.

Daley: For a period of time, [Fifth Element] was huge. It was a great resource for financial shit. Twelve inches were selling, CDs were selling, people were buying music. It was a huge plus for us to have this stream of income that had nothing to do with us pushing our art.

Sayers: Sean was working at Electric Fetus at the time. Once we got Fifth Element built up, I could then go, okay, you can quit your job now – you can work part-time at the store. Originally, the store staff was basically me and Sean. I would have artists working in the retail store, and we officed the label out of the back of the store.

Daley: It’s become a staple of the city. We have open mics there. We’ve had turntable clinics. When people come to town, they do in-stores there. It’s become basically a clubhouse for local rap cats. And that is something this city always needed.

I’m willing to bet that if you were to poll the rap community here, a good number of the groups are people who met each other via that store. In the long run, the store will have been more inspirational to the scene than Atmosphere was. Things are evolving, but no matter what, Fifth Element was a part of everybody’s history. That’s a really special thing. I don’t think you can quantify that in terms of how important it is. It’s too big for that.

By the early 2000s, Rhymesayers had grown enough that Sayers and co. began looking for partnerships with bigger companies to help them with distribution, marketing, and more. But instead of immediately jumping into bed with the first major label that came along (much to the majors’ consternation), they took a series of gradual, smart steps that ensured they maintained control the whole time.

Sayers: We never had any distribution deal until 2004. After [Atmosphere’s 2002 breakout album] God Loves Ugly, pretty much every major label head started calling, and we took meetings with everybody. Nothing felt right at the time. It just didn’t seem like anybody really got what we were doing. Some of them didn’t seem like they had even heard of Atmosphere.

At that time, if you were doing those kind of numbers on your own, the labels wanted a piece of it. The major labels didn’t accept people selling records on their own. If you were selling records, you were going to get signed one way or the other. But a lot of those meetings were so funny because a lot of the label heads were kind of shook with our cavalier attitude. We were building careers for ourselves, we were all eating, we were selling records, everything was working, so we weren’t hungry. Back then, they were so used to people needing them and no matter what they said across the table, people jumped. We were sitting there like, “We’re good. We can sit down and talk and see if you can make things better, but honestly, we don’t need this.” Maybe some of that was just being naive to the possibilities, but for us it just felt right. We’ve always approached business in that sense, with our gut, and with what felt right to us.

Through those meetings, we met Epitaph. We really liked them. We had a very similar spirit in the sense of our independent approach, and obviously they found huge independent success. But doing a distribution deal with them didn’t really make sense, because they weren’t a distributor, they were a label. So we ended up doing another short-term licensing deal with them for [Atmosphere’s] Seven’s Travels and Eyedea & Abilities’ E&A. That was the next phase in taking us to another level. We got some radio and video play for [Atmosphere’s song] “Trying To Find A Balance,” and definitely expanded the fan base through that deal.

Then while that was going on, we were working on trying to find a distribution deal, and that’s when we did the deal with Navarre, locally. A big part of it was, I had a relationship with somebody who was over at the company at that time. It was somebody I actually worked with way back at Best Buy. The company was in our backyard. So there was something nice about feeling like, hey, if we need to go talk to these guys, if we need to go chase them down for our money, it’s a fifteen minute drive from our office to go deal with it. It’s not a plane ride to New York or L.A.

Daley: I regret none of [our deals]. Now, you’re only talking to me. I can’t speak for everybody at the label. I’m speaking for my opinion, which is that of an artist. I regret none of that, because worst case scenario, I learned some shit. No matter how you cut it, you’re going to learn something, and you’re going to take what you learn and apply it to the next decision.

Sayers: We knew all these steps were stepping stones to get to the next phase. I think we were there [at Navarre] for two years, and they were changing their operations and stopping music. So that’s when we started shopping around for a new distribution deal.

Warner Brothers started an independent division called ILG, which was their Independent Label Group. It was kind of an independent label incubator. So we could come in intact, use major label services if we wanted, at a charge, or we could just do it ourselves like we’d been doing and use their independent distributor ADA. It was supposed to give us a lot of flexibility, so if we had a bigger record, we could pull in Warner radio services or marketing services or sales services or whatever we might need. It was a great concept, but I think it was a little ahead of its time, and it never really materialized like we envisioned it for us.

Daley: At the end of the day, I realize that this machine we were taught was evil, it’s not an evil machine. It’s full of people that actually want to make art, make money, and make things happen. Most of these people are actually good people. It’s just that when you put them all together in one room, shit can get kind of messy.

Part V: “Thanks for being part of this little legacy” - Influence and looking back

After two decades as a key player in hip-hop, Rhymesayers Entertainment stands among the elite of hip-hop’s record labels, independent or otherwise. The guys at the heart of it all, though, have a hard time reflecting on the past.

Sayers: Honestly, I haven’t been the biggest fan of the whole looking back aspect, because it’s not in my nature. I’m the guy that doesn’t get excited with our wins, and I’m constantly thinking about what I have going on today and tomorrow, and what I want to achieve next week and next month and next year. I don’t get caught up in a lot of where we’ve been and what we’ve done. It’s one of those things where I think everybody else has to gauge [the legacy of the label]. It feels weird for me to try and define that.

Daley: I have a hard time with compliments. We’re the little engine that could. And I only give us that much credit because we’re still going! If we weren’t still going, then I’d probably be like, we’re the little engine that tried, you know what I mean? I wouldn’t put us next to Cold Chillin’ or Def Jam or any of that kind of shit, because I know the impact that Cold Chillin’ had on me. I know the impact that B-Boy Records had on me.

Now, that’s not to say there’s not a kid out there who feels the same way about Rhymesayers and the impact it had on them, but I can’t speak on behalf of that kid. I stand so close to Rhymesayers that I probably don’t take it as serious as a fan does. To me, this is my fucking life, but it doesn’t define me. If this were to all come crashing down tomorrow, I’d still have to go figure out what else to do. So at the end of the day, I’m fortunate to be in the situation I’m in, I’m happy to be here. But I’m the last dude that’s going to look in the mirror and be like, “Sean, you’re amazing.” That’s just not my thing.

Sayers: I feel like I can say that we’re in a major way responsible for developing a scene here in Minnesota. That’s probably my proudest moment. Us staying here in Minnesota, us opening the only dedicated hip-hop shop in Minnesota, us doing the kind of shows we do here.

When we started, venues weren’t even letting hip-hop into the clubs. And we opened those doors back up. Now, in Minnesota, you could find a hip-hop show damn near every day of the week. There’s a thriving local scene. There’s developing artists that are making noise on the national scene. And so I know we played a big role in paving those roads for those things to happen.

Daley: I realize there’s a huge impact that we’ve made, but I don’t know if it’s on hip-hop. I think the impact that we made is more so on my city, my community – and that’s really where my loyalties lie anyway. I never set out to make a huge mark on hip-hop. I just really wanted to put it down for my city, and I really wanted my people to be proud of me. I hope I’ve accomplished that.

Sayers: I know what we’ve done is a rare thing. When I sat and talked with Lyor Cohen, or when I sit and talk with Andy [Kaulkin] over at Epitaph, I know we’re part of that tree. Where are we? Where do we fit in? I don’t know. But I know we’re part of it.

Listening to Lyor Cohen or Rick Rubin talk about the early days of Def Jam, it’s literally the same. We didn’t pattern it after their experience because we didn’t know their experience at that time. But listening to them talk, I’m like, damn, that’s the exact same model and ethics that we took on inherently. Just to know that we’re part of that family tree somewhere is important. That means a lot to me somewhere in the back of my head, when I stop and think about it.

I am the host of The Cipher, the critically acclaimed hip-hop podcast (theciphershow.com) which conducts in-depth interviews with the genre’s most interesting and important figures. I am also the former Editor in Chief of Rap Genius, and have written about music and culture ...